


Shattered Together

by lamella



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, apocalyptic rituals, just have a blast yknow gettin lost and eaten by a buncha eldritch tunnels, the spiral! a fun and confusing time!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 08:21:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21714385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamella/pseuds/lamella
Summary: Michael Shelley's thought process as he goes through the first door and follows the map, and how he becomes Michael.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 38
Collections: Rusty Quill Secret Santa 2019





	Shattered Together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [certifieddyke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/certifieddyke/gifts).

When he’d first stepped onto the island, he’d been comforted by the warmth and the slight give of earth under his feet, after the frigid metal deck of the Tundra had numbed him to the bone. It hadn’t made sense, the warmth, even at the shore of the arctic island, before everything started twisting and diffracting into something barely comprehensible. Now the sensation of heat under his heavy winter boots leaves a sour-bitter taste in his mouth.

Everything is wrong, and confusing, and terrifying, worse than what drove him to join the archives, worse than what took Ryan even before that. He’s gone mad, surely, to be seeing all of these things that could not possibly be real, tangled up in this clay fortress of stairs and doors meeting at angles that do not exist, every face carved with big twisting grins and patterns that make him want to vomit.

But Gertrude is there, two steps in front of him, constant and certainly realer than anything else, so he follows her until she comes to a stop at a door which is not-yellow and not-real, although he can see every detail of it, down to the swirling grain of the wood under the paint. 

The Archivist pulls out a map, and puts it into his hands. Her eyes are iron-cold when she looks up at him.

“How- how can I help?” He asks.

“Walk through the door.”

He takes the map, and turns to the door. His mind is a mass of seething white terror, and maybe it’s his sanity crumbling under the fear, but the twisting world actually buckles around him, making massive spiralling sharp fractals out of reality when he steps - the step is the only clear thing in his mind, a final choice to enter, because Gertrude told him to and he trusts her through the fear - across the threshold into the corridor. 

And everything slides into place. 

The corridors are- well, they’re twisted and confusing, but no more than the outside, and it gives him a little perspective when the dull click of the door behind him closing heralds an even more acute sense of imminent doom. But when he turns around, there’s no door, no Gertrude, nothing but a mirror that reflects his own exhausted and teary-eyed face. He can see his pulse racing in his throat, notices how huge his pupils are. 

But he’s in there for a reason, and he’s going to trust that Gertrude had her reasons for sending him in. He will be fine, or he won’t be, and he’s the trade-off to make sure nobody else gets hurt. Either way, there’s worse fates than dying for a cause. So he looks at the map, which finally makes some sense despite the twisting, impossible lines, and he starts down the corridor towards his destination.

(His final destination, maybe. He’d hated that movie, and the spike of irritation through the adrenaline and panic is enough to make him laugh, a shaky, weak chuckle that sounds more alarmed than amused.)

It’s a long and circuitous route through impossible corridors. Some doors open easily, and some of them stay jammed until he throws his whole body weight against them. His hands get bloodied and injured very quickly, shattering the mirrors he needs to use as passageways.

The mirrors and paintings lining the walls start to shift as he progresses, more and more showing a dark twisted figure, hands improbably huge and jointed all wrong, contorted in ecstasy and anticipation.

Something in Michael’s gut, which twists more with every turn, understands that it is a part of these corridors. 

More concerning than the presence of the creature itself, some of those paintings show it in a doorway, ready to step out of its domain. Michael can feel something else growing, too. Looping currents of confusion and delusion cast through the air, sending little eddies of delirium through his mind while he walks on. 

It takes a long time, or maybe no time at all. The deeper he gets, the more difficult it becomes to hold onto little things like seconds and minutes and hours. Eventually he sees blond hair in a photo, though, and steps closer to see an image of himself from behind. It twists him, makes him seem even taller than his already 6’5” frame, bending all of his features out of proportion. He starts, looks around him for some camera behind him (He should be used to them, it’s stupid to startle. It’s not like the archives aren’t chock-full of digital eyes.), but there’s nothing there, only renewed panic rising in his throat. 

Soon after, it seems like every picture has either him or the twisted figure, inching closer to it’s freedom, ready to step over the threshold of itself into the world. 

It’s not much longer before he comes to the final threshold. A huge mirror. It’s mounted at the impossible end of a hall. The twisted figure, the one where it is wrong and sculpted out of sharp angles and lies, waits and moves and freezes in the reflection, and so does he, their limbs carefully entangled so to never touch. 

Michael Shelley takes a deep breath and reaches out. He touches cool glass, feels a faint vibration that might be from his own shaking hands. In the reflection, they look too big. Too sharp. The too-big too-sharp hand flinches back in tandem with his own, and he steels himself, raises an arm. It’s a clumsy overhand swing, but it works.

He breaks the mirror, the final barrier between him and it, and suddenly the world disappears. 

No. The world is torn from him. And then it’s back, just as quickly, him and something else pushed painfully into each other. 

He realizes it’s not that the world’s been torn from him, but that he’s been ripped from himself. It leaves behind the window dressing, but he is shoved out and into the other creature, where they twist into one thing.

To say it hurts would be an understatement. There is nothing but the tearing agony, and he cannot breathe or think when his limbs - which aren’t his, maybe? - stretch and warp into strange shapes, contorting like the clay the monument he’s walked into bent in shapes that shouldn't have been possible. 

Now he sees that of course they’re possible, more reasonable than any simple cube or sphere. It’s just one little spark of awareness among a million, as an aching void that takes and takes and takes spreads over his mind, leaving nothing but confusion and understanding. 

He knows what he has to do. 

He Knows what he has to do, even.

To cut self from body, even in a situation like this, hurts. It is the most horrible ripping sensation, a tearing in his bones (which are not bones) and a choking catch in his throat (which does not breathe and exists only to lie and lie and lie) as the who is torn bloody from the what. 

It is not a clean break. Ragged fragments of identity hang off of the ‘what. Those memories cling and snake into him when he pushes it into himself, eating and razing whatever they can in the carnage.

Tearing the humanity out hurts less, but it takes some of the other ‘who’ with it, the one that he might have called “me” before stepping into the corridors. The fear, the empathy, the forgiveness. Curiosity stays. Anger. Even some little dregs of caring stick around, gumming up the insides of the chest as it cracks and bends into something new.

There is just one creature standing in the hall. It is a Distortion. It is even, a little bit, a Michael. What it is not is Michael Shelley.

Michael Shelly simply does not exist.

But the thing that is not, and never was Michael Shelley, can see Gertrude Robinson out of one of it’s hallways, a fleck on board a distant ship. A doorway, which isn’t a doorway at all, gives an angle where it can see her face. 

An Assistant is dead, and there is not a drop of care in the Archivist’s steely eyes. It is a necessary and pointless sacrifice. 

A liar can taste a lie, and under the Archivist’s aggressive indifference lies nothing more than a distaste for cold weather. There is no room for regret or sentimentality. She does not even bother to mimic grief for another replaceable part.

The Distortion, still tied up and weak in the tangle of its new identity, seethes.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays! 
> 
> Thank you to @certifieddyke for the prompt and @rusty quill secret santa organizers for putting this event together!
> 
> Also, ironically enough one of the other prompts was for a corruption Martin. I'd write a second part to Apis, but this one was just so tempting.


End file.
